According to the December 2019 jobs report, a healthy 145,000 jobs were added and unemployment clocked in at a 50-year low of 3.5 percent.
As Rep. Kevin Brady pointed out: “Two years after passing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the U.S. economy has now created 3.2 million more jobs than projected before President Trump’s tax reform.”
If you look deeper into 2019’s economic numbers an encouraging trend has emerged. The Trump economy, particularly after passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, has seen great increases in opportunities and prosperity for American women.
- Women’s participation in the workforce today is steadily increasing.
- Women’s wages are rising at a faster percentage rate than men.
- Women of color are winning the jobs race.
Here are the numbers.
MORE WOMEN IN THE WORKFORCE:
The Trump Administration is reversing the effects of the Labor Force Participation Rate of women during the Obama Administration. Women are increasingly getting pulled off the sidelines and into the workforce, rather than the other way around.
As Reuters noted, “A tight U.S. labor market and booming demand in industries with an abundance of female workers is drawing more women back into the workforce, helping to shrink the longstanding gap in the labor participation rate between men and women to the narrowest on record.”
The Wall Street Journal also reported, “The share of women on payrolls, excluding farmworkers and the self-employed, exceeded the share of men in December for the first time since mid-2010, Labor Department data released Friday showed. Women held 50.04% of jobs last month, surpassing men on payrolls by 109,000.”
GREATER INCREASES IN WAGES FOR WOMEN:
Women have seen a much larger jump in wages than men since the start of the Trump Administration, and nearly three times as much since the second quarter of 2019. This is according to the weekly earnings numbers released by BLS on October 16. Overall men and women have seen nominal increases in their usual weekly earnings over the last quarter, year, and since the enactment of Tax Reform and the beginning of the Trump Administration. Here are the numbers:
THE JOBS RACE IS BEING WON BY WOMEN OF COLOR
With a record number of job openings, women of color have been experiencing the greatest increases in opportunity.
The New York Times reports “…Hispanic women have emerged as the biggest job market winners in an economy that has now grown for 121 straight months, assuming data released in coming months confirms continued growth. Employment rates for Hispanic women between 25 and 54, prime working years, have jumped by 2.2 percentage points since mid-2007, the eve of the Great Recession. That’s the most of any prime-age working group. Black women came in second, adding 1.6 percentage points.”
The bottom line: A pro-growth agenda of tax cuts and regulatory reform have led to a record jobs boom, and women are seeing the biggest gains in the Trump economy. Republicans will continue to push for this growth to continue, starting with passing USMCA without delay – which is expected to add another 176,000 jobs to the U.S. economy.